Interactive Visualisation as a Tool for Interpreting Building Thermal Simulation Results

During building design there is a growing need to reduce energy usage whilst maintaining the comfort of the occupants. The latter is referred to as ‘thermal comfort’ and can be measured by the extent that the internal temperature of the building does not exceed a specified comfort level. Traditionally these two measures of building performance are seen as a trade off. Moreover, energy efficient building design is a complex process involving a large number of design variables each of which differentially affect both energy usage and thermal comfort. There is a vast search space to be traversed to find an optimal set of potentially good designs. This coupled with computationally expensive building performance simulation software leads to a problem which is potentially intractable. In the past the authors have used the Interactive Visualisation Clustered Genetic Algorithms (IVCGA) to address some of the complexities of multi-disciplinary building design problems. The aim of this paper is to apply the IVCGA to allow the building designer (physicist) to: Firstly discover a set of potential design solutions which meet the design objectives of minimal energy usage and maximal thermal comfort individually; Secondly discover a set of potential design solutions which are common to all objectives (mutually inclusive region); Thirdly present a means to understand the impact that particular design variables have upon each objective.